The new, social, democracy of media and beyond
Marshall Mcluhan once famously proclaimed on both the message and the medium. Most of us have grown up with the accepted truth of the media as an imperious and unshakeable institution; the disseminator of news and views, fact and (occasional) fiction; the property of Barons and magnates, living in castles on the hill or fortresses...
Citizen Truths and Civic Principles: The Reformation of Public Relations
At an event today, the great and the good in UK media discussed ‘where the truth lies’ in business and media today. Guests bristled through a lively conversation on a wide range of topics...
Big Society, Great Society?
Like so many people, I am trying to work out three things. How progressive is our new Prime Minister? How do his values fit with the (somewhat right) Lib Dems in his Cabinet and what on earth is the Big Society all about? Is it just me who wonders at the coincidence that ‘Big...
The Rat, the Squirrel and Chimes of Freedom Flashing
It has been something of an odd couple of weeks, with some of my professional peers either brazenly speaking of lying (PR Week, February 3rd), or offering somewhat antediluvian points of view about what PR really is and how we go about our everyday business. Having recorded the BBC’s The Bottom Line with the erudite...
Looking Again at The State We’re In
I have been doing a lot of reading and thinking around the subject and nature of Trust, as we prepare to launch the 2010 Edelman Trust Barometer in London and in Davos this week. It will come as no surprise to many to learn that – as with the interim Barometer, published in the summer...
Citizens / Climate change / Communications / Individuality / Leadership / New Economics / Trust / Wellbeing
Inverting The Power Pyramid
Preparing some notes for a panel session at next week’s CBI forum on Climate Change, I am struck by how top-down the world still really is and suddenly alarmed that I remain in a narrow minority of those wishing and willing to embrace bottom-up democracy and ride the chaos of new networks. The CBI intro...
Milton Friedman is Dead
The Gordon Gekko mantra that ‘Greed is good’ is now oft-repeated in casual conversational references to an era passed, but those who still cling to the Friedman obsession with free markets and the doctrine that the social responsibility of business is to maximize its profits...
Politics is dead – long live citizen-power
At last some honesty from a politician. David Milliband has delivered a Mea Culpa and come clean saying that transport has not “fundamentally changed”, a shift in power from Whitehall to local government “has not yet happened” and, on the environment, “our low carbon revolution is still to come”. He also admitted that “the traditional...
The Apple Cart
Last night I saw the most wonderful production of Nobel Laureate George Bernard Shaw’s The Apple Cart at the ever-reliable Theatre Royal Bath. The play depicts a world in which business runs the show, the country lurches from crisis to crisis and the politicians are a dilatory, squabbling rabble unable to organise their way out...
